Off to her left, she watched a Lizard tank struggling to pull three or four trucks from the morass into which they’d blundered. The tank wasn’t having a much easier time moving than the trucks. Ludmila’s lips skinned back from her teeth in a predator’s grin, If she hadn’t been under orders, she could have shot up the convoy. But deviating from the mission assigned would have caused her more grief than it was worth.
Another change of course and-if everything had gone right-the apple orchard should have been a couple of kilometers dead ahead. It wasn’t, of course. She began a search spiral, not something she was happy to do in broad daylight: too much chance of flying past Lizards who weren’t so preoccupied as that last bunch had been.
There! Bare-branched trees beginning to go green, with here and there the first white blossoms that before long would make the orchard look as if snow had fallen on it, though all the rest of the world was verdant with spring. A man waited in amongst the trees.
Ludmila looked around for the best place to land her plane. One stretch of boggy ground seemed no different from another. She’d hoped the partisans would have marked off a strip, but no such luck. After a moment, she realized no one had told her this Sholudenko was connected with the partisans. She’d assumed as much, but what were assumptions worth? Not a kopeck.
“As close to the orchard as I can,” she said, making the decision aloud. She’d landed on airfields which were just that-fields-so often that she took one more such landing for granted. Down she came, killing her airspeed and peering ahead to make sure she wasn’t about to go into a hole or anything of the sort.
She was down and sliding along before she saw the old gnarled roots sticking out of the ground. She realized then, too late, that the orchard had once been bigger than it was now. She couldn’t wrench back on the stick and take off again; she wasn’t going fast enough.
The Kukuruznik didn’t need much room to land. God willing (a thought that welled up unbidden through her Marxist-Leninist education and training), everything would be all right.
She almost made it. But just when she started to believe she would, the tip of her left ski caught under a root as thick as her arm. The U-2 tried to spin back around the way it had come. A wing dug into the ground; she heard a spar snap. The prop smacked the ground and snapped. One wooden blade whined past her head. Then the Kukuruznik flipped over onto its back, leaving Ludmila hanging upside down in the open pilot’s cabin.
“Bozhemoi-my God,” she said shakily. No, the dialectic somehow didn’t spring to mind when she’d just done her best to kill herself.
Squelch, squelch, squelch. Someone, presumably the fellow who’d been standing in the apple orchard, was coming up to what had been her aircraft and was now just so much junk. In a dry voice, he said, “I’ve seen that done better.”
“So have I,” Ludmila admitted. “… Comrade Sholudenko?”
“The same,” he said. “They didn’t tell me you would be a woman. Are you all right? Do you need help getting out?”
Ludmila took mental inventory. She’d bitten her lip, she’d be bruised, but she didn’t think she’d broken anything but her aircraft and her pride. “I’m not hurt,” she muttered. “As for the other-” She released the catches of her safety harness, came down to earth with a wet splat, and, filthy, crawled out from under the U-2. “Here I am.”
“Here you are,” he agreed. His Russian, like hers, had a Ukrainian accent. He looked like a Ukrainian peasant, with a wide, high-cheekboned face, blue eyes, and blond hair that looked as if it had been cut under a bowl. He didn’t talk like a peasant, though: not only did he sound educated, he sounded cynical and worldly-wise. He went on, “How do you propose to take me where I must go? Will another aircraft come to pick up both of us?”
It was a good question, one for which Ludmila lacked a good answer. Slowly, she said, “If they do, it won’t be soon. I’m not due back for some hours, and my aircraft has no radio.” No U-2 that she knew of had one; poor communications were the bane of all Soviet forces, ground and air alike.
“And when you do not land at your airstrip, they are more likely to think the Lizards shot you down than that you did it to yourself,” Sholudenko said. “You must be a good pilot, or you would have been dead a long time ago.”
“Till a few minutes ago, I thought so,” Ludmila answered ruefully. “But yes, you have a point. How important is this information of yours?”
“I think it has weight,” Sholudenko said. Someone in authority must have agreed with me, or they would not have sent you to do tumbling routines for my amusement. How large my news bulks in the world at large… who can say?”
Ludmila slapped at the mud on her flying suit, which spread it around without getting much of it off. Tumbling routines… she wanted to hit him for that. But he had influence, or he wouldn’t have been able to get a plane sent after him. She contented herself with saying, “I don’t think we should linger here. The Lizards are very good at spotting wreckage from the air and coming round to shoot it up.”
“A distinct point,” Sholudenko admitted. Without a backwards glance at the U-2, he started north across the fields.
Ludmila glumly tramped after him. She asked, “Do you have access to a radio yourself? Can you transmit the information that way?”
“Some, at need. Not all.” He patted the pack on his back. “The rest is photographs.” He paused, the first sign of uncertainty he’d shown. Wondering whether to tell me anything, Ludmila realized. At length he said, “Does the name Stepan Bandera mean anything to you?”
“The Ukrainian collaborator and nationalist? Yes, but nothing good.” During the throes of the Soviet Revolution, the Ukraine had briefly been independent of Moscow and Leningrad. Bandera wanted to bring back those days. He was one of the Ukrainians who’d greeted the Nazis with open arms, only to have them throw him in jail a few months later. No one loves a traitor, Ludmila thought. You may use him if that proves convenient, but no one loves him.
“I know of nothing good to hear,” Sholudenko said. “When the Lizards came, the Nazis set him free to promote solidarity between the workers and peasants of the occupied Ukraine and their German masters. He paid them back for their treatment of him, but not in a way to gladden our hearts?”
Ludmila needed a few seconds to work through the implications of that. “He is collaborating with the Lizards?”
“He and most of the Banderists.” Sholudenko spat on the ground to show what he thought of that. “They have a Committee of Ukrainian Liberation that has given our patriotic partisan bands a good deal of grief lately.”
“What is the rodina, the motherland, coming to?” Ludmila said plaintively. “First we had to deal with those who would sooner have seen the Germans enslave our people than live under our Soviet government, and now the Banderists prefer the imperialist aliens to the Soviet Union and the Germans. Something must be dreadfully wrong, to make the people hate government so.”
No sooner were the words out of her mouth than she wished she had them back again. She did not know this Nikifor Sholudenko from a hole in the ground. Yes, he dressed like a peasant, but for all she knew, he might be NKVD. In fact, he probably was NKVD, if he had pictures of Banderists in his knapsack. And she’d just criticized the Soviet government in front of him.
Had she been so foolish in 1937, she’d likely have disappeared off the face of the earth. Even in the best of times, she’d have worried about a show trial (or no trial) and a stretch of years in the gulag. She suspected the Soviet prison camp system still functioned at undiminished efficiency; most of it was in the far north, where Lizard control did not reach.
Sholudenko murmured, “You do like to live dangerously, don’t you?”